Mr D.
I share with you your horror of contemporary Islam and I know from the comments that you have left on my blog (http://breathofthebeast.blogspot.com/) that you are not inherently a classical “over-simplifier” so I am happy to have the opportunity to clarify my reference to your remarks as over-simplification.
As any serious thinker must acknowledge, every religion has within it the seeds of the kind of atavistic, bloodthirsty, collectivist fundamentalism that we see ascending in the Islamic world today. Christianity spent most of its first two thousand years (longer than the entire history of Islam) behaving the same way using the bible as justification. Judaism has had centuries of barbarity in the past also. You may talk all you want about Islamic jurisprudence and I agree with you about its effect on humanity but you could say the very same things about the Spanish Inquisition. Both Christianity and Judaism, along with most of their sects and peripheral cults have joined the modern world and accepted tolerance, dialogue and mutual acceptance as the ideal. It is not logical to look at this record and assume that Islam cannot, ultimately, respond to the right kind of (in order of importance) logic, violent counter-reaction and persuasion to overcome its past and present ignorance.
Moreover, the alternative to logic, appropriate (I am in favor of more and better focused than is being applied currently) violence and persuasion would only to be wholesale slaughter. This is (again in order of importance) impossible, unthinkable and impractical.
As I have written on my blog, there are a few ways into real solutions. Most of them require that logic and persuasion be applied to the great weaknesses of the Caliphate Islam Movement. These are (also in order of importance) Women’s rights, Child Abuse, Humiliation due to the exposure of illogical beliefs and behavior and Humiliation due to the total ineptitude and uselessness of the Islamic governmental and economic approach. If we can liberate their women and children and show them that their humiliation is self-inflicted, we will have no need to kill them all- they will be modern.
It will not be easy or bloodless but it is possible.
